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Verbmobil: The Translation of Spontaneous
Speech in Negotiation Dialogs
Professor Wolfgang Wahlster
DFKI, Germany
When: Friday, 2nd December 1994
Time: 4:00pm
Where: Microsoft Institute, Theatre (via reception on left of building)
Abstract:
The long-term vision behind the Verbmobil project is a portable translation device that you can carry to a meeting with speakers of other foreign languages and it will translate what you say for them. We discuss four distinguishing features of the Verbmobil approach: the speaker-adaptive recognition of spontaneous speech, the processing of negotiation dialogs in face-to-face situations, the notion of translation on demand by a mobile assistance system, and the three language scenario (English, German, Japanese) with Englsih as the common dialog language.
First, we describe the data collection effort, the formalisms used for speech and language processing, and the architecture of the first Verbmobil demonstrator. Then we focus on the three-layered model for dialog interpretation and the incremental language generation component of Verbmobil. We will also discuss the use of synchronous tree adjoining grammars for the fast translation of simple dialog contributions. Finally, some commercial and international aspects of the Verbmobil project will be addressed.
The Verbmobil project is funded by the German Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT) and an industrial consortium including Siemens, Philips, Daimler-Benz, SEL-Alcatel and IBM. Currently more than 100 researchers work in the project. The project started in 1993 and is planned for 8 years. For the first four years phase of the project the research budget amounts to 90 Million Deutschmarks.
The Speaker:
Wolfgang Wahlster is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saarbruecken, Germany where he currently serves as a Scientific Director of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Since 1975 he has been the principal investigator in various language projects, including HAM-ANS, WISBER, SC, XTRA, VITRA and WIP. He has published over 100 technical papers on natural language processing. His current research includes intelligent multimodal interfaces, user modeling, natural language scene description, intelligent help systems, and deductive plan recognition and generation. Professor Wahlster is an AAAI Fellow and a recipient of the Fritz Winter Award, one of the most prestigious awards for engineering sciences in Germany, for his research on cooperative user interfaces. Professor Wahlster served as the Conference Chair for IJCAI-93 in Chambery and the Chair of the Board of Trustees of IJCAII from 1991 -1993.
Enquiries: Maria Milosavljevic 9850 6345 mariam@mpce.mq.edu.au
| Last modified: July 1997 |